FLC | LANL, HPE partner to expand HPC options for COVID-19 research

LANL, HPE partner to expand HPC options for COVID-19 research

April 29, 2020

Los Alamos National Laboratory, partnering with Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, is building on existing infrastructure at Los Alamos to create a new high-performance computing system dedicated to COVID-19 researchers and applications.

“As part of its COVID-19 effort, the Laboratory is increasing its computational capabilities to support a variety of related research problems,” said Irene Qualters, Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and Computation. “This is a unique opportunity to provide a broad range of researchers with the versatile, next-generation computing capabilities they need in the battle against COVID-19.”

As the Department of Energy (DOE) continues to expand its efforts to fight COVID-19, LANL is participating in a number of activities in concert with other DOE labs, federal and state agencies, universities, and industry partners.

The new HPC system will be a 1000+ AMD Rome Node platform with more than 128,000 cores occupying two HPE/Cray racks. It will be one of the most powerful machines that Los Alamos has dedicated to the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. The system will align with LANL's and other DOE labs’ next generation machines, and will be made available on LANL’s open network, which provides remote and local users with access to ultra-high-bandwidth connectivity.

By leveraging the space, power, cooling, hardware, networking infrastructure, systems management, and user support already available at Los Alamos, the new system will be quickly deployed and could be online before September.

The laboratory has already dedicated a number of high performance computers to examine areas such as how artificial intelligence might apply in analyzing the spread of COVID-19, and in developing a path to a vaccine. Other important areas of study include optimizing the medical infrastructure to manage the anticipated number of patients and understanding the mitigating or correlating factors of COVID-19’s spread.

The research was supported by the DOE Office of Science through the National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory, a consortium of DOE national laboratories focused on response to COVID-19, with funding provided by the Coronavirus CARES Act.